


The Pressing of Walls

by 9_of_Clubs



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Angst, Bittersweet, Claustrophobia, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Hannibal hates the Cold., Hope, Just because Hannibal deserved it doesn't mean it didn't hurt, M/M, Post RD Post Prison fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-30
Updated: 2014-10-30
Packaged: 2018-02-23 06:49:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,252
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2538248
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/9_of_Clubs/pseuds/9_of_Clubs
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Someone requested After everything, Hannibal is left with Claustrophobia, and I was only too happy to oblige.<br/>--<br/>“I awoke and it seemed as though the walls were all pressing together, pushed by the snow.” A hollow flit of a laugh. “I have still not yet confirmed they aren’t.” </p><p>There’s truth in it, in the words, Will senses that easily enough, but not all of it, Hannibal giving him just enough to say nothing at all, but luckily Will has always been good at reading between the lines. From anyone else, the words might draw mirth, but Will has awoken himself to the walls doing things they shouldn’t, melting, burning, the demons always close.</p><p>“Should I confirm for you?” He murmurs, fingers trailing down, around to where Hannibal’s are clutched against his knees, the uncomfortably tense line of his spine more rigid with each moment, he brushes along the skin, threads their hands together.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Pressing of Walls

The first thing Will realizes when he opens his eyes is that he’s cold. It’s been frozen for days, their house at the edge of the woods covered in snow, no choice but to wait for the onslaught to cease and the powder and ice to melt. The landscape around them stark, empty and endless under the blanket. And even though the heat is running and burning embers are always in the fireplaces, the chill is still inescapable, seeping in through the cracks. But eased, in the nights, by the usual presence of Hannibal’s presence around him, shutting it out, the room cold, but Will warm. He’s alone now though, grey dawn somewhere behind the endless clouds, the side of the bed the other usually occupies, empty. 

Maybe, it’s nothing, maybe only the threads of ice, the restlessness that comes with breathing the same cramped air, but the absence sits uneasily in his veins, travels down his spine and curls there. Out of the warm covers it pushes him, a sweater of Hannibal’s over his head, and then out of the room as well, the hallway dark, the silence spreading, no familiar clatter from the kitchen or a low hum of some aria wafting up the walls, nothing to indicate Hannibal’s presence anywhere in the stillness of the house. He tugs the sweater closer around him and frowns, just the cold, he tells himself, wanders down the hall, past the bathroom, down the stairs. Padding footsteps echoing around him as he turns the corner into the living room and almost misses Hannibal completely, his sight passing through the dimness, through the silence, body shifting to go, but something stronger pulling him back, some greater sense that binds them together, alerts him to Hannibal’s presence even without knowing, another blink and he’s there, formed, curved against the window. There’s a dark blanket around his shoulders, the ugly sweatpants Will bought him, grey and shapeless draping his legs. The warning signs. Even from a distance he can see the tremors of discontent flittering through the other’s body and despite everything, despite how incredibly far they’ve come, it sets ugly fear thrumming through him. Even so, he moves forward.

“Hannibal?” He asks quietly, a step back at the flinch that causes, a sudden jolt away from the frosty glass and then an unconscious lean back, eyes going to trace the exterior as though there is something to see, something beyond the blinding white, working hard to find it. Will peers too, but there’s nothing out there, a hum of confusion, the tendrils of worry. It wouldn’t take an empath to know something has gone awry. Something all wrong, he realizes as he, closer now, the pale light of snow illuminating, with even the breaths that are rushing through Hannibal’s body, too slow and then too fast, tilting towards the window as though he might fuse with it if only he pushed hard enough, fingers white in fists. He spares his breath asking what’s wrong, only pulls over a chair and settles, hesitance in his reach, but fingers falling atop the blanketed arm. 

They sit silently like that for a heartbeat, Will’s so loud in his ears he swears Hannibal can hear it, the worry pounding louder still. Hannibal doesn’t pull away, but he doesn’t relent to the touch either, glued still to the pane as though it’s somehow necessary. 

Finally, a considering noise, eyes on slipping onto him, half appraising, wary. 

“I awoke and it seemed as though the walls were all pressing together, pushed by the snow.” A hollow flit of a laugh. “I have still not yet confirmed they aren’t.” 

There’s truth in it, in the words, Will senses that easily enough, but not all of it, Hannibal giving him just enough to say nothing at all, but luckily Will has always been good at reading between the lines. From anyone else, the words might draw mirth, but Will has awoken himself to the walls doing things they shouldn’t, melting, burning, the demons always close.

“Should I confirm for you?” He murmurs, fingers trailing down, around to where Hannibal’s are clutched against his knees, the uncomfortably tense line of his spine more rigid with each moment, he brushes along the skin, threads their hands together. 

The barest hint of affection, of warmth, flares up at that, the shared heat of their bodies, Hannibal tightens his momentarily, more assurance than squeeze. “Your presence pauses their progress for the moment.” Another flit out of the eyes, across the barren whisper of winter, breaths frantic much as Hannibal’s iron control attempts to hold them, now that Will is here, but in that too, he overcompensates, forces them to be too labored, the acute instability in something as solid as a mountainside. But beneath the stone, Will knows, there are hollow bits and weak spots, scars barely healed, still chafing - jagged edges that cut deep into the landscape. “But I fear even it does not stave them off completely.” 

“We could go outside.” He offers lowly, after the quiet has swallowed their sounds again, stolen their voices in ways that set the strain in Hannibal’s neck again, so he speaks without knowing in what direction exactly he goes, enough that it creates the space to breathe. “Forget the walls altogether.” They’d chosen this house for its relative solitude, close enough to the city for Hannibal to find art and culture as he pleases, tucked far enough away for Will to avoid it, the untamed nature of it appealing to them both, so the spaces are vast and theirs, the snow drenches it now, everything in deep sleep, but Will would if - 

Hannibal is shaking his head. “It is cold.” There’s an unhappy twist of lip, an almost pout and Will’s mouth curves up despite himself, the ever present affection thrumming up, Hannibal’s inability to accept anything but what is most suitable to him, about to form softly teasing sentiments, but they die on his throat as the other speaks again, the words falling from the tongue in a torrent, as though they’ve been strung on a bow, waiting to be loosed, bitter and dark like the winter.

“The cold is not better than being caged.” 

His eyes flick up to Will’s at that, and then a quarter turn away with his chin, towards the window, away, their grip loosening, lips pressed into a thin line. The realization of too much said, shoulders knitting stubbornly, defensive, voice unwilling to admit the insecurities the body betrays, breaths too frantic again, shifting in increments, the blanket tighter around him, turning, Will allows him to go, the erratic pulse beneath his touch hammering into his skin whether or not he’s touching, the sudden press of understanding invading his mind. 

As the exhales slow again, harsh in the air, he looks around them through Hannibal’s eyes. No sweeps of pendulum necessary for this, the other’s consciousness as readily available to him as his own, once he knows in which direction he’s going. The darkness first, cloying, despite the lamps, despite the power, inescapable in the corners, light to make everything visible, but not to make it bright, no amount of electricity and flames enough to drive it away. Only the washed out reflection of the snow creeping around them, too dim, too sickly, the colors faded, the sounds muted. Outside, the constant white of the ground, only dark branches breaking the unending stretch of nothing, transforms for him, shifts into a different colorless place, one Will knows as well, as closely as Hannibal does, but he’d been focused, he’d been motivated, and he’d been freed. The walls close in, inch by inch, the panicked reach around, but the senses are muffled again, empty, no anchor to grab onto, the endless grind of uninterrupted blankness. The walls are not walls, walls in his mind, walls outside in the hushed space, walls in the restless rustle of the spaces walked over and over. Nothing distraction enough as the locks tighten in his mind, no exit. Caged. The breath fleeing from his lungs. 

In the next heartbeat, he’s blinked, and everything is only quiet again, dark, but steady, the entrapment fades, lingers at the edges. 

“We’re not in a cage.” The words are soft, tainted with the sadness of hollow understanding, his hand trailing out again, but lighter this time, as air, only the brush of his fingertips. “Not anymore, neither of us.” 

In the black blanket and the grey pants, pale in the thin light, Hannibal is as colorless as the rest of it, as faded as he was in the cell, but his eyes have healed in inches, the raw scrap of prison eased into something softer, and he moves them now, one more inhale into the glass, the unsettling slump of his body twisting, back to Will. Tired, tired lines, and Will wonders how long he’s been fighting this battle, beneath the armor of the suits reclaimed, the sumptuous meals made, the perilous creation of his life once more. Unthinking, his free hand finds Hannibal’s cheek as it turns to meet him, wraps around it carefully. The claustrophobia does not extend to him, he knows, this touch will not aggravate it, far beyond the scope of their physicality.

“I feel the shackles still.” More rumble than voice, the edges of syllables. “Always, everywhere, waiting. The emptied holes, the parts lost. They throb, threaten to expand.” Pure loss for Hannibal, the fading of his memories, the dulling of his mind - the painful grind of resharpening. “I fear they will never fill, and now it is frozen, and there is only emptiness to look upon, and so they widen. And there is no escape.” The last words a hiss, fingers clenching into themselves again.

Will does not interrupt, careful breaths at the ache that fills him.

“I had thought when we were free, when you -” Softening for a moment, the faintest twist of pleasure, flits of need. “when you were here, and you are here. I thought perhaps then, it would go again. That I would -” A breath, a headshake, and his eyes have tilted down, back to the window for a moment, as though assuring himself the world is still out there, empty as it might be, gaze hooded, dark and shadowed.

“Be whole?” Almost a laugh, but no amusement. 

The cruel, broken, reaches of himself declare this justice, that Hannibal feels as he does, finally, the same cut up, pasted together, breaks in his mind, the same hopeless reach around, blind for all the parts that have gone. Damage wreaked by Will, by prison, by unyielding walls and constant loneliness. The ugliness that Hannibal created, with his fingers that manipulated and stole and destroyed, is pitiless. 

The rest of him only understands. 

Mourns for the beautiful, terrible, whole that Hannibal once was, deservedly or not, and this shade with all his scars unearthed. Loves. Loves him all the more for it, for the stilted nod, the curve of neck into Will’s touch. 

“But the damage reigns.” 

He pulls him up pliantly at that, away from the window, from the boundaries that Hannibal dashes himself against, the walls that he throws his body into, trying to break them down, but are only really in his mind. He feels the franticness race for a beat, but then his arms are around the other, pulling him close, and a fraction of the rigidness fades. 

“We’re never going to be whole, Hannibal.” Truth, rough, in the face of fantasies, the wishes he has himself, for the scars to vanish and the agonies to pass, that he can sense so acutely in Hannibal. Always a struggle against the tasteless, the ugly, the undignified, brought down to the levels he abhors the most, that press against the rawest points, and held there, the fight to find life amongst that. “But that doesn’t mean we can’t heal.” 

The other’s head tucks against his neck, the blanket falling to the floor, replaced by Will’s body. 

“The snow will melt.” He offers. “Spring again and summer. You’ll make ridiculous picnics and try to insist we sit at a table, the sun will be warm, the earth alive. And us.” The words for him, enough to drive away the dark thoughts, Hannibal’s hair mussed around his cheeks, still from his flight from sleep, neither of them have had a summer in a long time, years, maybe, but time has finally begun to move again, and the toll of winter will pass. “We will be too and that will have to be enough.” 

Hannibal moves finally, shifts in increments to wrap his arms around Will in return, a deep sound from his throat, a hum of the images against the panes of ice. The after effects even he could not retreat far enough from to escape so terribly clear, scars stitched into his being as they are into Will’s skin. But he’s here now, they both are.

“I should like life.” The pulse is evening, the breaths find rhythm, again, a glitter of a fight igniting, settling together into the space they make, the breathing room, maybe it will go again, maybe on for the moment, but for now the moment, enough. “With you.” 

“And you have me.” Neither of them alone in the dark days.

Hannibal’s fingers tighten, a half whisper of breath, their bodies tangling together, hands twisting into Will’s shirt, and he can almost feel the colors whirling back around.


End file.
